1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to HTTP request handling and, more particularly, to re-using asynchronous server-side results generated for a request context of one client to satisfy a request context of a different client.
2. Description of the Related Art
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/846,423 entitled “Method and Apparatus for Client-Side Aggregation of Asynchronous Fragmented Requests” disclosed a solution for client side aggregation of asynchronous context-sensitive request operations in a single application server environment. A concept of client-side content aggregation is extended by U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/843,038, entitled “Client-Side Aggregation of Context-Sensitive Request Results Where Results for Aggregation are Asynchronously Produced by Multiple Servers” which teaches client-side aggregation of context-sensitive request results where results are asynchronously handled by multiple servers.
With the advent of asynchronous request dispatching, one or more application servers can handle simultaneous, asynchronous requests for different requesting clients. A possibility arises that two or more of these concurrently handled requests to produce identical content. For example, a first client can request a portal page, which includes a default news portlet. The news portlet can include dynamically generated content produced by a server in response to an asynchronous request for the portlet content. Soon after, a second client can request a portal page, which also includes the default news portlet. By default, a separate asynchronously request for the news portlet information will be initiated and have to be handled separate from the request for the first client. This scenario results in two concurrent requests ultimately rendering the same content, which represents a duplication of effort at multiple layers (e.g., thread creation, duplicate response output, unnecessary request processing, and the like).